Goodmail Systems, Mountain View, CA, yesterday said that America Online and Yahoo! will deploy the Goodmail CertifiedEmail service to help shield messages from spam, fraud and phishing scams.

With CertifiedEmail, messages are marked with a trust symbol in the inboxes of AOL and Yahoo! users, assuring the messages are safe and from an accredited sender.

"Today's e-mail users view incoming e-mail from familiar commercial sources with uncertainty and doubt," said Goodmail chairman and CEO Richard Gingras, in a prepared statement. "Our objective is to restore safety and reliability to this critical communications medium. We are very pleased to work in partnership with AOL and Yahoo! as they become the first online services to offer this powerful capability, extending their leadership in providing the best possible e-mail experience for their customers."

Separately, Goodmail announced that the American Red Cross is participating in the charter program for the Goodmail CertifiedEmail service. The Red Cross will use the service to ensure that donation acknowledgements arrive in donors' inboxes and not in junk or bulk mail folders, which has proven to be a challenge, even for legitimate organizations.

"As the popularity of online fundraising increases, hackers have tried to capitalize on the generosity of the American people," said Kimberly Reckner, lead technical liaison of Online Fundraising for the American Red Cross, in a prepared statement. "Our organization works hard to protect the public from misleading, unauthorized and fraudulent fundraising. Goodmail's CertifiedEmail service will distinguish authentic communications from fraudulent solicitations and provide an extra layer of security for our donors."

The CertifiedEmail service works by embedding messages with a cryptographically-secure token which must be detected by participating Internet service providers before the message can be delivered to a recipient's inbox. The e-mail is labeled with a CertifiedEmail symbol in the user's inbox indicating that the message can be opened with confidence and that it is from an authentic and trusted sender. This eliminates the "maybes" that have compromised the safety and reliability of e-mail, the company said.

The service includes sender accreditation, message certification, secure unsubscribe and consumer feedback mechanisms, and reputation monitoring and enforcement.

Goodmail also announced that e-mail infrastructure providers Port25 Solutions Inc. and StrongMail Systems Inc. will offer a tested and approved Goodmail Imprinter Appliance, a self-contained solution to certify a stream of e-mail messages from Goodmail-accredited senders. Additionally, StrongMail, Port25, Sendmail, and ColdSpark will be integrating Goodmail functionality into their e-mail delivery products and services.

AOL and Yahoo! expect to complete implementation in the coming months.